Mapping the History of Photographers

Thanks to the New York Public Library you can now search a huge database of photographers by name, nationality, date, location and gender. You can even view your search results visualized on an interactive map.

The Photographers’ Identities Catalog is a new interactive map from the New York Public Library which allows you to explore and map information about photographers and photography studios across the globe. The map includes a number of filtering options which allows you to search the database by name, specific dates, location and by gender.

For example, if you are interested in female photographers working in the nineteenth century, you can set the date range to finish at 1899 and refine your search to only show female photographers. The results are then shown on the map and the map sidebar. The map shows the locations of birthplaces, places of death and the areas that the resulting photographers worked in.

If you select an individual photographer's name from the map sidebar you can view their biographical details and see their birth, work and death places on the interactive map.The information panel also provides a link to the source of the database information for the selected photographer.